You are here

Climate Change

Climate Change

Climate change is a large and immediate threat to public health, disproportionally affecting individuals from middle and low-income countries. Few empirical studies have examined the health effects of climate change in these countries, for the most vulnerable populations, and for chronic diseases, particularly cardiovascular disease (CVD). Without detailed information on the direct and indirect effects of climate change on chronic diseases and the populations most susceptible, effective policies to reduce climate driven health impacts will be limited.

This study leverages a decade of detail observational data from the ongoing Prospective Urban and Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study (157,231 adults living in 682 urban/rural communities across 21 countries of varying socio-economic status) during a recent period of global warming (2002-2016). We are extracting long and short-term temperate data for each PURE community using the Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS v2.1) through the Google Earth Engine. Future analyses will examine how these short and long-term temperature changes influences chronic disease.

Climate change may influence health through a number of direct and indirect pathways. This study will expand from heat exposures to determine other pathways (e.g. diet, occupation, physical activity, air pollution, migration, conflict, chronic stress) linking climate change to chronic disease in the PURE study. This study will also identify susceptible populations and prevention and adaptation actions at the individual, household and community levels.